Posts Tagged ‘installation’

So here’s my confession. During our recent house exterior repainting, we painted over an old wood door. We painted over wood sidelights, and a wood transom.

That’s right, we painted wood. Old wood. Some of it was even pretty wood.

You see, our front door is objectively not great. At one point, we think it must have had a glass panel inset into it. It might have matched the flower pattern in the sidelights and transom. That would have been pretty awesome. But by the time we got this house, the panel of glass – or whatever it was – had been replaced with a big piece of plywood. And the plywood had been painted with a mural of flowers.

Like most people who buy old houses, I love the look of gorgeous old wood. And believe me when I say that I love how our house is full of old wood – the floors, the furniture, the piano. If it were a door like this, you can bet we wouldn’t have been painting over it. I think there’s very little that beats the look of a gorgeous wood door surrounded by painted sidelights and a painted transom. I also really like the look of a painted door with painted sidelights and a painted transom. But the one look I’m not a big fan of is the missing combination above: a painted door with wooden sidelights and a wooden transom.

And that’s what we inherited.

Here are the issues above, as I saw them:

1) Sun damage to the wood sidelights and door, getting progressively worse from top to bottom. The top third was pretty okay – if it had all been like that we would not have painted it. But compare the wood from the top to bottom:

2) Mural on front door. Again, this is a matter of personal preference, and I’m sure it probably looked nicer 20 years ago when it was first painted, but the sun fading had not been kind to it, and to be honest we just ended up hanging a wreath over it as a cunning disguise 99% of the time.

Mural? What mural?

3) Ugly old storm door missing paint in areas due to bird poo from many years ago, also causing uneven amounts of sun damage to the door (see above image). Closed at a slight angle which caused scratching to the frame, and was not securely lockable against toddler escape.

1) Replace the front door with one that was wholly wood and the right era/design for the house. Strip and refinish the wood sidelights and transom, and commit to an annual re-coat with UV protectant to protect them from damage from the strong sunlight on our south-facing porch.

2) Paint it all.

Guess which one won in the budgeting department?

But.

Let’s talk about wood purists for a second. There are people – and I mean a LOT of people – who think that under no circumstances should anyone paint over wood, ever. We even heard cautionary tales from neighbors about that one house where they painted over a wood front door and people are still talking about it fifteen years later. And we were both raised by wood purists. So even though it was a pretty obvious decision from a budgeting perspective, and there are TONS of beautiful painted doors we love and have photographed on our travels, we actually took FOREVER making up our minds about it. It was by far the longest part of the decision making for the entire house, and the thing the two of us went back and forth about the most. We even had the painter paint it halfway and then made him stop so we could be sure that we were sure that we were sure. One of us may have been 39 weeks pregnant at this point – I won’t say who – and perhaps used that as a slight leverage for her (or his) perspective. But it’s all done now.

We decided to paint it.

Based on the popular photo we saw from this post at On Sutton Place, our first color choice was pretty easy: Sherwin Williams Naval. And just four coats later (next time I would definitely go with a TINTED primer to help reduce that number)… here we were:

Coming soon in Part Two (who would ever have guessed the front door would need 2 posts?): the storm door dilemma, the search for an interesting door knocker, and the soul-trying saga of installing the new mail slot.